Sunday, April 17, 2016

Rumor: Yankees Turned Down Winter Deal Involving Andrew Miller

The New York Yankees were very aggressive this offseason on the trade market making every and any player available in the right deal. The names that were mentioned out loud to the media most often though were Ivan Nova, Brett Gardner and closer Andrew Miller. News broke this week, and I use the word "broke" loosely here, that the Yankees had a deal in place to trade at least one of them and they ultimately declined the deal at the end of the day.

The Houston Astros were looking for a closer for much of the winter and rumor had it that they at least had preliminary discussions with the New York Yankees about Andrew Miller. Ultimately the Astros ended up sending an impressive package of young players to the Philadelphia Phillies over the winter for their closer Ken Giles although before pulling the trigger an identical offer was made to the Yankees for Miller.

I know I'm far from a GM at the Major League level but that would be an awfully hard deal to turn down if I were Yankees GM Brian Cashman. Velasquez was unproven at the time but had shown glimpses of brilliance in a small sample size with Houston in 2015 while Mark Appel is a former 1st round draft pick by Houston and 1st overall pick in the 2013 MLB Draft. Arauz and Eshelman are a pair of A-Ball pitchers with underwhelming stats overall while Oberholtzer is entering his fourth season in the Major Leagues and has yet to break out but this would have been an obvious deal for the future for New York.

Adding Appel to their minor league system alongside James Kaprielian while adding Velasquez to a young rotation alongside Luis Severino would have been great for the Yankees future but I am reserving judgement on whether it was a "good" non-trade or a "bad" non-trade at this time. There are a lot of moving parts here and a lot of young and relatively unproven moving parts in this deal as well. Velasquez could bomb, Appel could never reach his potential etc. etc. etc. These trades are a crap shoot.

I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying the team's philosophy and mindset is different than yours or mine. If they couldn't improve the rotation they were going to take the pressure off with an insane bullpen.

After losing Wilson and Warren with Chapman facing a suspension I just can't see the Yankees trading Miller. Haul or not. And don't mistake it, that is a haul.

What does A Rod and Beltran have to do with the pitching though? This offense was the second highest scoring offense in all of MLB last season and they had Stephen Drew and a terrible Chase Headley and Jacoby Ellsbury. This is about the pitching.

Glad you asked Daniel;IF we had the power and all around talent of those two players in the prime of their careers...would we be so worried about our pitching so much?Just think of it, A-Rod at SS and Beltran in CF with the talents they had it would be a three/four man Murderers Row.

We all know we don't have any pitchers without a flaw...some bigger than others...but, we do have good pitchers working through a team slump. Come on, we know they aren't as bad as they have shown so far this year.Our pitchers have much more talent than what we have seen and when they get things back on line let's hope our hitting picks up as well...because it sucks also! Is it time to give-up on the team? Not in this lifetime!